Fixing Dependency issues with the SPFx Generator

Applies to the SharePoint Framework

I’ve been playing with the new SharePoint Framework (SPFx) Extensions lately and ran into strange error when attempting to create a new one. I ran the yo @microsoft/sharepoint command and filled out the prompts to create a new Field Customizer extension. Things looked like they were working for about 15 seconds when I got this sadness:

“Congratulations”

Here’s the relevant text of the error:

No compatible version found: @microsoft/decorators@~1.0.1
Valid install targets:
1.1.0, 1.0.0, 0.2.1, 0.0.0
This is most likely not a problem with npm itself.
In most cases you or one of your dependencies are requesting
a package version that doesn't exist.
It was specified as a dependency of '@microsoft/sp-application-base'

So what happened? I could use this generator just a few days ago!

The first thing you should do when troubleshooting issues with the generator is check your version vs the available versions.

To check your version just use the following npm command:

npm list -g @microsoft/generator-sharepoint

When I did, I found I had version 1.1.0 so I checked what versions were available: